POST-GRENADA, POST-CUBA, POSTCOLONIAL

Abstract

This essay argues for understanding Caribbean postcoloniality as a particular relationship to the Caribbean revolutionary tradition embodied by the Cuban and Grenada revolutions. Looking at how Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here invokes both of those revolutionary moments sheds light on what makes contemporary Caribbean literature postcolonial. In Another Place, Not Here locates itself as a postcolonial text through its relationship to the anticolonial project, both paying homage to and critiquing the limitations of that model. Brand's novel most obviously engages with the legacy of Caribbean revolution through the close resemblances of its unnamed setting to Grenada in the early 1980s; but the novel also directly deploys and rewrites some of the forms of discourse most closely associated with the Cuban Revolution. In particular, the stories of Elizete and Verlia employ two of the genres that came out of Cuba during the 1960s: the testimonio and the story of the intellectual stepping away from privilege to join the revolution. By positioning itself in the aftermath of these milestones in the Caribbean revolutionary tradition, In Another Place, Not Here suggests how we might understand postcolonialism as a simultaneous desire to live up to and critique the political projects of the decolonization era.